Verint: Driving a 300% Improvement in Sales Processes with Gamification

Many people think about gamification as a way of driving sales people to compete. In reality, however, sales professionals are already driven to sell through their compensation and commission structure.

But gamification can be a highly effective tool for encouraging salespeople to perform administrative tasks and follow processes required by the organization. For example, it can be used to foster greater use of CRM systems, enabling better reporting, more timely responses to sales opportunities, and greater sharing of data for use in forecasting and understanding the sales funnel.

The challenge

Graeme Gabriel, strategic workforce optimization consultant at Verint®, began thinking about using gamification to encourage salespeople in the EMEA region to better leverage Verint’s CRM system, make timelier entries in accordance with established processes, and sell more effectively to enterprise accounts.

“The main issue was that our sales team wasn’t consistently making the best use of our CRM system,” says Gabriel. “This sometimes made pipeline forecasting more difficult than it should have been. While team members are already measured and incentivized according to the revenues they bring in, we wanted them to execute tasks in our CRM system more consistently. Gamification presented an innovative—and engaging—approach to help us achieve the results we wanted.”

The approach

Verint focused on three core goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for the deployment:

Primary contacts: “We wanted our salespeople to update a field called ‘primary contact,’ which provides important opportunity information that’s needed by departments beyond just the sales team,” says Gabriel. “Some team members kept this information in their address books or notes, but not in the CRM system, where others in the company could access it. This was a prime area in which we wanted gamification to help us drive a change in behavior.”

Accepted opportunities: “We have a process under which salespeople need to ‘accept’ new opportunities. But some of our people were not doing this as quickly as we’d prefer,” Gabriel explains. “We wanted to be sure that all potential leads were contacted in a timely manner.”

Next steps: “We also wanted all of our salespeople to document the next steps for each opportunity, so we could take that information and work the deal into its correct position in the pipeline. This was happening sporadically, but we wanted everyone to follow the process consistently,” Gabriel adds.

Content: Verint created content items (such as quizzes, simulations, and blended learning sessions) as a way of driving engagement. Using the Gameffective solution, it has been able to drive both learning and engagement. “We prepare 2-3 items a week, and try to make them funny and engaging,” Gabriel says. “We also issue a ‘weekly winners’ email to drive further engagement.”

Team competition: “We created team competitions among the different sales geographies,” says Gabriel. He notes that traditional European rivalries are reflected in the dynamics. “At first, the Dutch team won and the German team came in last. This made the Germans take notice, and both teams have competed head-to-head ever since.”

Results and the future

The impact of gamification was unmistakable. The three core KPIs for the initiative (primary contacts, opportunities accepted and next steps) grew by 300% on average. “We’re very pleased with the results,” says Gabriel. “Growth of 300% as a result of gamification in several months’ time is impressive, and we’re looking at ways to further leverage gamification to help us drive additional behaviors and learning,” he says.

About Verint

Verint® is a global leader in Actionable Intelligence® solutions with a focus on customer engagement, security intelligence, and fraud, risk, and compliance. Today, over 10,000 organizations in more than 180 countries—including over 80 percent of the Fortune 100—count on intelligence from Verint solutions to make more informed, effective and timely decisions.